"On the morning of Sunday, February 22, a Mexican state operation was launched in Tapalpa, Jalisco, culminating in the arrest and killing of Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), along with other capos and gunmen.
As soon as the military operation was detected by the cartel, it responded with a series of attacks, primarily targeting government banks, stores, shopping centers, and highways, blocking roads and setting cars and buses on fire. The violence unleashed that Sunday was not confined to the area where Oseguera was located; it spread to the city of Guadalajara—the country’s third most important city—as well as to Puerto Vallarta and to twenty other states, particularly Jalisco, Nayarit, Guanajuato, Michoacán, and Hidalgo. As a result, many work, educational, and transportation activities were paralyzed on Sunday and Monday. These actions were similar to those carried out by the Sinaloa Cartel in October 2019, when the Mexican state captured Ovidio Guzmán in events known as “El Culiacanazo,” which at the time led then-President López Obrador to negotiate the drug lord’s release in exchange for an end to the violence.
This is yet another episode in the wave of terror endured by the people of Mexico since the launch of the so-called War on Drugs nearly twenty years ago by the government of Felipe Calderón, a war that has left hundreds of thousands dead or disappeared, along with kidnappings, enforced disappearances, death camps such as Teuchitlán, and clandestine mass graves—where the working class has borne the greatest share of suffering.
In light of these events, we state the following:
First, drug trafficking in Mexico was born, grew, and developed under the auspices of the United States. During the Second World War, the United States encouraged the cultivation of opiates in our country to meet its military needs, with the support and corruption of politicians, military officers, and police throughout decades of PRI governments. For decades, U.S. intelligence agencies—primarily the CIA and the DEA—coexisted, negotiated, armed, and supported different drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico. This formed part of their anti-communist and counterinsurgency crusade across the continent, particularly during the Reagan administration, in order to obtain additional resources for the fight against insurgency in Central America and Colombia. There is no evidence of genuine attempts by the United States to prevent narcotics from flowing in massive quantities across its borders and flooding illegal drug markets.
Second, the Mexican state is closely linked to the development of drug trafficking and the cartels, as well as to successive processes of their reorganization. The involvement of the Army, counterinsurgency and intelligence agencies—such as the now-defunct DFS and CISEN—as well as police forces at all three levels of government, is extensively documented. Examples include the cases of General Gutiérrez Rebollo, José Antonio Zorrilla, Genaro García Luna, and the Zetas cartel, formed by former members of elite military troops. The vast sums of illicit money flow freely through financial circuits, seamlessly integrating into the mechanisms of capital in our country, where they are laundered through agribusiness, real estate and construction industries, and political life. None of the bourgeois parties that have held executive power escape this reality, including the PRI, the PAN, and also MORENA.
Third, it must not be forgotten that various cartels have been used as shock forces against the peasant and Indigenous movements in our country. They have also been used by the Mexican state in the kidnapping and disappearance of Comrade Enrique López, member of the Central Committee of the PCM, in the murder of Raymundo Velázquez Flores, Samuel Vargas, and Miguel Ángel Solano, leaders of the PCM in Guerrero, as well as against hundreds of social activists.
The current operation is framed within a set of corrosive pressures on national sovereignty established during Trump’s second term, including the increase in personnel from various U.S. agencies along the Mexican border, overflights of aircraft and drones along Mexican coasts and territory, the extradition of prisoners from Mexican jails without adherence to judicial procedures, and the sinking of barges in Mexican maritime boundaries. This has intensified with the Trump administration’s designation of Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and the implementation of a new U.S. National Security Doctrine. However, the U.S. claim of combating drug trafficking is a hypocritical pretext, given that within its own territory there is no serious fight against the major drug distribution networks or tracking of the enormous volumes of money they generate—while it reaches agreements with the Sinaloa Cartel, incorporating its members into the ranks of protected witnesses. Likewise, in Mexico, history demonstrates that when the state persecutes one cartel, it does so to favor others, and the painful case of Ayotzinapa revealed the entanglement between law enforcement forces and drug cartels.
The spectacular nature of the operation beheads the CJNG but does not dismantle it or eliminate its military and economic strength, nor that of other cartels, which may open new cycles of violence that the people will endure. We do not overlook the diversity of economic branches into which drug trafficking has expanded, not only criminal activities such as drug transportation and sales, extortion, prostitution, migrant smuggling, and protection rackets, but also its growing presence in the national economy: control of highways and ports, oil theft (huachicol), the importation of precursors for fentanyl production, and steel exports. There is no way to conceal its entanglement with the governmental apparatus at all levels, and, as already stated, with every bourgeois party without exception.
The Communist Party of Mexico regards drug trafficking—that is, the drug industry—as a cancer and considers its eradication a necessity. However, we harbor no illusions that this is possible within the framework of capitalism, insofar as it is inherent to it. We believe that the struggle against crime must be independent of the United States, which has no genuine interests in doing so and which at present makes it part of Donald Trump’s strategy to attempt a new regional dominance in the context of his rivalries with capitalist China.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!"
elmachete.mx